With Donald Trump as President, Americans Are Flocking to Socialism

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For now, DSA is proving an on-ramp for those frustrated with Trump and the Democratic establishment alike.

One evening the week before Christmas, about 100 people squeezed into a room in the Brooklyn Free School, located on one of central Brooklyn’s posher streets. The private school’s chair collection exhausted itself within minutes as attendees packed the room for the monthly meeting of the Brooklyn chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—which, just a month earlier, had fit easily into the same space.

Since Nov. 8, 2016, thousands have joined DSA. The organization has ballooned to over 14,000 members, more than doubling in size from 6,500 members in May 2016. DSA National Director Maria Svart says of new sign-ups, “You could literally see the moment when Trump was declared the winner.”

Organizations such as the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are reporting a similar spike in new members and donations in the wake of Trump’s election. But interest in socialist groups, grown accustomed to being small and isolated in U.S. politics, appears to be surging in a way it hasn’t in decades. Many of those joining are young people who don’t have their parents’ Cold War hangups about socialism. Politicians like Bernie Sanders—an avowed socialist whom many supporters are looking to for an effective counter to Trump—have further sparked their interest in a politics outside mainstream Democrats and Republicans.

That puts DSA in a promising, if uncertain, position in the wake of Trump’s election. “People … are looking to DSA as an organization that full throatedly supported Bernie Sanders in the primary and has the potential to be a serious part of the fightback, both to Trump and to the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party,” says Svart.

Founded in 1982 out of the remnants of the ’60s New Left, DSA also has roots in Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party of America, which at its height in 1912 boasted 113,000 dues-paying members. Eager to avoid the pitfalls of insular ideological squabbles, DSA strives to work with community organizations and social movements. Following the election, DSA chapters have mobilized to support organizing by communities threatened by Trump and his supporters, including local mosques and immigrant rights organizations. DSA is also working on building a multiracial membership—its current members are predominantly white—while supporting existing organizing by communities of color. Brooklyn DSA’s Racial Justice working group, for example, is partnering with the New York-based group Communities United for Police Reform to help pass the Right to Know Act, aimed at increasing transparency and accountability on the part of the NYPD.

Ultimately, says Svart, there’s agreement within the organization about “the need for a multi-racial, anti-capitalist movement that is in touch with the grassroots.”

For now, DSA is proving an on-ramp for those frustrated with Trump and the Democratic establishment alike. The Brooklyn meeting on Dec. 22, 2016, was the first for Hannah Silverman, a New York native who worked on local Democratic campaigns in high school but grew disillusioned with politics before heading off to Brown University, where she graduated in 2015.

“I was afraid [the meeting] would feel futile,” she said as chairs were being collected toward the end. Instead, she was pleasantly surprised by the tailored facilitation—after a discussion of the importance of organizing “openly as socialists” at the local level, the meeting broke out into smaller committees on everything from affordable housing fights to climate justice—and the high attendance. “Looking at Trump’s election, the only way to spin it positively is that it compelled a lot of people to become politically active,” she noted. “It created a sense of urgency that was missing.” She plans to attend next month’s meeting. In New York City alone, DSA now has 1,000 members.

But deep-blue Brooklyn isn’t the only place where democratic socialism is undergoing a resurgence. Local organizers are in the process of getting six new chapters off the ground in Florida and four in Ohio, both of which went for Trump in November. DSA’s tiny national staff, funded entirely by dues and small donations, has been overwhelmed by requests to create new chapters around the country and is looking for ways to expand accordingly.

Tom Tilden, 59, is among those DSA members setting up shop for socialism deep in Trump country. Tilden is a DSA veteran, having joined when he lived in Chicago in the late ’80s. But when he moved to Nebraska in 1993, Tilden says, he didn’t consider starting a new chapter there, though he remained a member of the national organization. When people talk about “the Left” in conservative Nebraska, Tilden explains, they’re referring to “people in the middle of the Democratic Party leftward. ‘The Left’ is progressive. People don’t usually think in terms of socialist.”

But that may be changing after Sanders’ primary run, which “changed the nature of the Democratic Party in the state” while stripping away some of the taboos that plague socialist politics, says Tilden. In Nebraska’s March 2016 caucus, Clinton won just 10 of the state’s pledged delegates to Sanders’ 15, and he successfully won over some of the state’s most rural counties. Since the caucuses, Tilden has been working to get a new chapter off the ground in Omaha, and another has sprung up in nearby Lincoln. About 30 people attended the first meeting in December 2016.

Like many other DSA members around the country, Tilden sees potential in building institutions outside the Democratic Party, but is also a firm believer in trying to stage a takeover from the inside. This fall, he joined Keystone XL pipeline opponent Jane Kleeb on the ticket to run Nebraska’s Democratic Party. She’s now the party’s state chair. Tilden is second associate chair, and has similar goals for his work in this position as he does as a local DSA organizer: Reaching working-class voters, especially those who went for Trump but might yet be won over to the kind of anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement that DSA hopes to build.

“People in rural Nebraska are more progressive than they realize,” Tilden reasons. While door-knocking during the Sanders campaign, he and other volunteers found that many rural voters took firm stands against corporate agriculture and attacks on public education. “I think once we work with them on their issue, they’ll see that the people on their side are not the Republicans.”

Instead, Tilden hopes, they just might embrace an entirely different shade of red.

SPUSA is also Democratic Socialist and they recognize that democratic socialism is NOT what Bernie defines it as, that's Social Democracy, which is a different thing entirely. Social Democracy is "humane capitalism". Democratic Socialism is a different way of saying "non-centralist (Leninist) Socialism". DemSocialism is about abolishing capitalism and private property, worker control of the means of production, Social Democracy is about welfare capitalism, Bernie Sanders doesn't know the first thing about socialism.

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Posted by Emma Boyd on 2017-03-09 22:20:13

where's Berkley?

Posted by laura2624 on 2017-02-13 10:39:51

If it's a "worker's paradise," why is it a crime to leave it? Nobody's stopping you from going there. They just stop you from leaving there. Health care? Why did they have to import doctors from Spain when Fidel had diverticulitis? Education? Under Batista they had the third highest literacy rate in the world. All the socialists did was prevent you from reading what you wanted to read,

Socialism...what a joke!

Posted by Bob Fritz on 2017-01-31 15:49:29

Would you rather live and raise your family in Cuba--with universal, high quality healthcare, universal education and literacy, little violent crime, virtually no grinding poverty and malnutrition, etc.--or in one of those nearby island nations, failed states that America and its corporations have long controlled? Cuba and Castro are far from perfect and may justly be criticized in many ways, but they blow away the competition by any reasonable scale of measurement.

Posted by Newton Finn on 2017-01-31 10:00:07

Mighty puny "flock."

WHERE is there a single place where socialism has actually worked? Cuba, where the Castros take from the rich, take from the poor, keep it, and prevent citizens from leaving the country at the point of a gun?

Posted by Bob Fritz on 2017-01-29 17:31:29

You mean like Scandinavia?

Posted by mellowridge on 2017-01-29 13:05:37

Socialist had a chance with Bernie Sanders, but Hillary sabotage that. The blame is squarely on Hillary and the DNC.

Posted by Steven Richards on 2017-01-25 20:29:08

Red states USA is the new "red plague". So are blue states, for that matter. I love my country, but the truth is we are our own worst enemies.

Posted by joe-god on 2017-01-25 09:40:12

@Jason: I stand corrected. Best of luck to the new DSA.

Posted by joe-god on 2017-01-25 09:32:41

Red states.

Posted by joe-god on 2017-01-25 09:23:21

Contrary to the rightwing propaganda, Venezuela is not "full socialism", nor was it under Chavez, who had to deal constantly with rightwing forces in his own country trying to undermine him (remember the failed coup of 2002 assisted by the Bush administration?) despite his popularity with the people. Chavez's replacement, Maduro, lacks the former's courage and conviction, and his own country's rightwing elites, with U.S. assistance, are working to push him out the same way they did with Chavez. Only this time they will succeed, as Maduro has already agreed to setting up a central bank via the International Monetary Fund, which means infinite debt-peonage or else. Socialism doesn't fail because it's a bad idea, it fails because it cannot work within the narrow parameters of capitalist markets, particularly when those powerful external forces happen to be the U.S. Venezuela has one of the world's largest oil reserves in the world, and if left alone to run their country the way the majority of Venezuelans would want, they wouldn't have such problems. But the U.S. has historically undermined any country, particularly in Latin America, who dares to attempt any kind of democratic socialism or national sovereignty. This is common-knowledge down there. Guys like Chavez or Castro were not angels, but they fought for the sake of national sovereignty, the same thing we here in the U.S. claim to value. But apparently we only value it for ourselves.

Posted by joe-god on 2017-01-25 09:18:15

I stand corrected. Best of luck to the new DSA.

Posted by joe-god on 2017-01-25 08:58:25

red plague

Posted by Sławomir Forysiak on 2017-01-25 08:55:21

Socialism is democratic or it is not socialism. Supporters of the status quo can relax: the DSA and Sanders are social democrats. Marx and Engels, by contrast, wanted something rather different: 'in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all' (Communist Manifesto, 1848). Nothing like this exists, or has existed. The old lie about Russia being socialist or communist (Marx and Engels used the terms interchangeably) –and later, China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc –was identified remarkably early: in the August 1918 edition of the Socialist Standard

Posted by Red Robbo on 2017-01-25 07:15:15

Full socilaism would be Venezuela- you should vacation their and see how great it is.

Posted by Berkley Townhouse on 2017-01-25 04:17:45

Its getting easier and easier to beat the democrat crazies- Thanks bernie! By the way- go live in Venezuela for a few months kiddies.

Posted by Berkley Townhouse on 2017-01-25 04:16:48

That wasn't the case with the Independent Socialist League in the '40s and '50s, which used the term "democratic socialism," and it's not the case now with DSA. DSA is anti-capitalist. From our constitution:

"We are socialists because we reject an economic order based on private profit, alienated labor, gross inequalities of wealth and power, discrimination based on race and sex, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo. We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships. We are socialists because we are developing a concrete strategy for achieving that vision, for building a majority movement that will make democratic socialism a reality in America. We believe that such a strategy must acknowledge the class structure of American society and that this class structure means that there is a basic conflict of interest between those sectors with enormous economic power and the vast majority of the population."

Posted by Jason Schulman on 2017-01-24 15:39:51

Yes, they disavowed their socialist roots back in the 1980s. Now it's "democratic socialism" a tactic used in order not to alienate still-brainwashed Democrats, IMHO. Sanders helped open this up, yes, but never spoke against capitalism in general.Therein lies the difference. Democratic-socialism is just another term for "humane capitalism", which is difficult if not impossible.

Posted by joe-god on 2017-01-23 14:08:44

IntheseTimes always talks about DSA, but never about the Socialist Party USA (the left wing of the Socialist Party of America that split in 72 with DSA), which is also seeing a growth spurt as well.